Monday, September 03, 2007

Reuters, reporting on IBM's recent breakthroughs in nanotech-enabled memory and storage, opens its story with this:

Imagine cramming 30,000 full-length movies into a gadget the size of an iPod. More here

I have said this before in different contexts, including a white paper I wrote for NanoMarkets a few years ago: "To think of molecular memory within the framework of existing applications is to severely limit the possibilities of this technology ..."

If 30,000 movies is the best we can come up with, then we have a severe crisis of imagination. I don't blame the Reuters reporter. Like the overused and inaccurate "human hair" comparison, "30,000 movies" places the technology in a context the average reader can understand.

And it is often not the inventor who decides how and where to apply new technology. It's the entrepreneur, the investor and ultimately the consumer who supply the imagination.

I can see one major consequence of essentially unlimited storage. It will be simplest to provide everyone with the Library of Congress and Wayback Machine archives on mass-produced sticks. Then it will be impossible to monitor the information being accessed by individuals, since everyone will have everything. It'll just be a matter of what they choose to look at, not what they receive.

Still, I'm being unfair implying such widespread myopia, in that American Gothic is only how the media views their audience. Thus, such a nano-device, an "iPocket" - to them - would only have one useful application; 30,000 movies, of which 29,978 would be porno (hat tip to the above). Which leaves precisely 22 regular films worth considering.

Meanwhile, I remain behind the techno-curve, amazed by everything from the telephone to Google, now add nanotechnology. Just the idea that we can create such self-replicators, it's totally amazing - and so far beyond my comprehension I'm standing here with a pitchfork.